On October 25th this year, the Vatican released a document that had remained in its secret archives for seven hundred years. It is the report of the official Church investigation into the activities of the Knights Templar in the early fourteenth century.

In October 1306, these crusader knights were found guilty of idolatry, blasphemy, and heresy, and their order was dissolved. Some were burned at the stake, others imprisoned, and most were stripped of their assets.

Astonishingly, this extraordinary document reveals how the Vatican enquiry found no evidence of wrongdoing. It was the Pope himself, Clement V, who directly intervened and declared the Templars heretics. The report appears to show that the pontiff was after their wealth, said to include priceless treasures once housed in the temple of Jerusalem and lost when the city was sacked in ancient times.

But despite the arrest and torture of leading Templars, and the wholesale seizure of their lands, nothing of this fabled hoard was ever found. Most historians doubt the existence of the Templar treasure.
However, my research suggests that one of the ancient relics they are said to have possessed may have been hidden in central Britain.

Hallowed Relics

In the heart of England, close to Stratford-upon-Avon, famous as the birthplace of William Shakespeare, is the village of Temple Herdewyke, named after the Templars who once resided there. After the Third Crusade in the late twelfth century, these Templars returned from the Holy Land to build a chapel to house certain holy relics they claimed to have found. Many crusaders came home with items purportedly associated with early Judaism and Christianity, and with characters and events in the Bible, but the Temple Herdewyke knights are said to have discovered the most famous biblical artifact of all: the Ark of the Covenant. At least, according to local legend!

Composite image of members of the Knights Templar (Public Domain) and a treasure pile. (CC BY SA 2.0)

They certainly claimed to have found what appear to have been considered hallowed relics at the time.

Contemporary records of land and property holdings reveal that in 1192 the chapel housed certain objets sacrés – “sacred objects” – which the Templars had acquired in the Holy Land, including a large golden chest. This is exactly what the Ark of the Covenant was said to be.

According to the Old Testament, it was a large golden box, made to contain the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, lost when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 587 BC.

Secret Messages

Although the Templars were rounded up in 1306, some evaded capture. Six hundred years later, a British historian suggested that they managed to survive in secret at Temple Herdewyke until 1350, when they were wiped out by the Black Death.

Jacob Cove-Jones, who lived in the area, not only believed they possessed the lost Ark, he also claimed to have discovered its secret hiding place. Having fallen out with fellow scholars for ridiculing his work, Cove-Jones refused to reveal his findings.

Jacob Cove-Jones (Public Domain)

He intended to carry out an excavation of his own, but sadly it never transpired. In 1906 he contracted tuberculosis and decided to take his secret to the grave. Well, almost! Knowing he had only a short time to live, the eccentric historian left behind a bizarre epitaph. He designed a stained-glass window that he commissioned to be made and installed in a new church that was being built close to his home in the village of Langley.

Astonishingly, on his deathbed he announced that the window contained a series of clues to lead to where he was sure the Ark was hidden.
Most dismissed him as a crank, while others who attempted to crack the code gave up without success. I personally remain to be convinced that this Victorian scholar really did know where the Ark was hidden or, for that matter, whether the Templars ever discovered the Ark at all.

Nevertheless, Jacob Cove-Jones certainly seems to have believed it, and went to a great deal of trouble to leave his cryptic message. It was, I decided, likely that the window did hold clues to lead to something; if that was actually the lost Ark remains to be seen. It was certainly worth investigating this century-old Edwardian mystery.

Clues in the Epiphany Window

Completed in 1906, the year Cove Jones’s died, Langley chapel is one of the smallest churches in England, and the window in question is set into a side wall. Called the Epiphany Window, it depicts the three Wise Men visiting the baby Jesus on Epiphany, the twelfth night of Christmas between January 5 and 6. Matthew’s Gospel relates how three mystics from the East followed a miraculous star that led them to Bethlehem where Christ was born. According to Christian tradition, the Wise Men ultimately found Jesus when a rooster uncharacteristically crowed at midnight on top of the building where the child slept. The window scene shows the Wise Men holding their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, praising the baby held in his mother’s arms, while above them is the crowing rooster and the wondrous star.

Strangely, the stained-glass window did not depict the Ark. Why the Nativity, I wondered? The Wise Men were said to have found the baby Jesus by following a star. Might a star be Jacob Cove-Jones’s vital clue? Was the seeker being told to follow a star?
The Ark of the Covenant is indeed associated with stars: two of them, to be precise. The Bible describes the Ark as having figurines of two angels on its lid. They were said to depict the archangels Michael and Gabriel that, according to Hebrew tradition, were represented in the sky by the stars Benetnash and Mizar, the tail stars of what we now called the Big Dipper.

The stained-glass window did in fact appear to show two stars, one overlaid on the other, and right next to this design were the letters B and M, the very initials of these stars. If these celestial bodies were to somehow indicate the location of the hidden Ark, I needed to know both when and from where to observe them.

In fact, the central image in the stained-glass window bears a striking resemblance to the tower, with its distinctive conical roof and castellated walls. It is represented as a container held by one of the figures, and upon it was another depiction of the phoenix, and the Latin words, “come and adore.” I was certain that Cove-Jones intended his seeker to observe the stars at 12 p.m. on Epiphany night, from the position of the tower. At that exact time, the two stars are low in the sky and, when viewed from the Phoenix Beacon, are pointing almost directly downwards to the foot of a hill on the horizon, specifically to a little village called Chapel Green.

Chapel Green is named after a medieval chapel that once stood there, but all that remains today is a Victorian drinking fountain standing beside the road. Dating from Cove-Jones’s time, it is a red-brick, rectangular structure, inlaid with an arched niche. It closely resembles a red-brick arch depicted in the window scene, right below the star design.

Convinced that this was exactly where the clues in the Epiphany Window were intended to lead, I organized a geophysics survey of the area, but although we discovered evidence of the original chapel, nothing made of gold or resembling the Ark appeared to be there.
Tragically, in 1949 the lane was widened and the ruins of the centuries-old chapel were destroyed. Perhaps the workmen involved had dug up whatever was there to be found. If it was the lost Ark, they kept it quiet.
At present, I am trying to discover who the workmen were, so I can trace their living relatives. Maybe – just maybe – someone in central England still knows the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant. The vessel famously described by Indiana Jones as “a radio for talking to God.”

Top Image: The Ark of the Covenant, as described in the Bible. (Picture from the cover of The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant by Graham Phillips, published by Inner Traditions • Bear & Company)
By Graham Phillips

The Origin of the Knights Templar – Descendants of Jewish Elders?

The Knights Templar initially arrived in the Holy Land on a mission to reclaim some treasure that they believed was rightfully theirs. According to the modern Templar historians, Tim Wallace-Murphy and Christopher Knight, the knights who banded together as the Knights Templar were part of a wave of European royalty descended from Jewish Elders that had fled the Holy Land around 70 AD, when it was invaded by the Romans.

Templars of the Rex Deus Families

Before leaving their homeland, these Elders had hidden their temple treasures and priceless Essene and Kabbalistic scrolls in strategic regions of the Holy Land so that the Roman invader Titus could not plunder them as the spoils of war. The Jewish Elders then immigrated to Europe. There, many of them married into the continent’s noble families. Of these Elders, twenty-four would become the patriarchs of a group of European families known by the sobriquet of the “Rex Deus” or “Star” families.

For hundreds of years the secret locations of the Jewish treasure filtered down through the families of the Elders – until the First Crusade, when knighted members of the Rex Deus joined the procession of holy warriors traveling east with the dual goal of defeating the Moslems and recovering their family treasure.

The original nine Knights Templar were either born into or related to the Rex Deus families, as was Godfrey de Boullion, the French general who led them against the Saracens during the First Crusade. His cousin, King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, assisted the Templars in retrieving the treasure by donating the al-Aqsa Mosque for their use.

Northeast exposure of Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel. (CC BY SA 3.0)

Treasures from the Holy Land to Scotland

Traces of the Templars’ ensuing excavations were later discovered in the 1800s by a detachment from the Royal Engineers of Great Britain and are now in the possession of the family of the late Knight Templar archivist of Scotland, Robert Brydon.

Apparently the Jewish Elders had stashed much of their treasure under Solomon’s Stables, because it was there that the Templars spent most of their time excavating. After nine years of digging, the original nine Knights had accumulated enough treasure and documents to fill four large trunks.

When their patron, King Baldwin II, suddenly took ill and died, the Knights took their four cases into Europe, stopping briefly at St. Omer in Flanders to have one of the documents copied and then replaced by cleric Lambert de St. Omer. Called the Heavenly Jerusalem, the copied document is now stored in the library of the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Copy of the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem.’ (University of Ghent)

After a special ceremony with Pope Honorius III at the Council of Troyes in 1128 (making their organization official in the eyes of the Church) two of the Knights, Hughes de Payen and Andre de Montbard, carried their four cases of treasures to Kilwinning, Scotland, the location of the “Mother” Grand Lodge of Freemasonry.

Rosslyn Chapel and the Four Large Cases

The trunks resided there for many years before eventually being moved to Sinclair Castle in Roslin, near Edinburgh. The Sinclairs were one of the Rex Deus or Star families whose destiny had, according to one legend, become forever entwined with the Knights Templar when their ancestress Catherine de Saint Clair married Hughes de Payen a decade or so before he took the vows of a monk in 1128. It is because of the Sinclair-Templar bond that much of the Knights’ treasure, including the prodigious wealth that landed in Scotland after the Templar escape from France in 1307, ended up in the coffers of the Sinclair Clan.

The Sinclair Earls of Roslin kept the four cases of Templar treasure safe in their castle until a fire unexpectedly broke out and they were forced to remove them from the collapsing edifice. The calamitous event apparently had a silver lining, however, because legend has it that soon after the fire, construction on nearby Rosslyn Chapel began in earnest. Thus, the safekeeping of the four boxes may have been the original purpose for the construction of Rosslyn Chapel.

Recent confirmation for the survival of the four cases in Rosslyn has come through ground scans in the chapel taken over the past twenty years, which reveal a vault in the crypt containing four large boxes. This vault is located directly under the keystone and within the most energetically protected part of the chapel.

If Rosslyn Chapel was built as a copy of Solomon’s Templar or Herod’s later temple, as many believe, then this region of the chapel would correspond to the inner sanctum or Holy of Holies. Researcher Christopher Knight contends that Rosslyn Chapel is a model of Herod’s Temple, which is why it contains a so-called “unfinished” outer wall.

The outside of Rosslyn Chapel, Roslin, Scotland. (Mark Amaru Pinkham)

Knight asserts that this wall was added intentionally to give the Chapel the appearance of the ruins of Herod’s Temple – as it looked when the Templars excavated under it. If this is true, then Rosslyn Chapel was built to duplicate Herod’s Temple so that the Knights’ Jewish treasure could be symbolically returned to a version of its original hiding place in the Holy Land.